Dead in Time

DEAD IN TIME

by

Anna Reith

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This book is a work of fiction. Names, places, events, and characters are fictitious or are used fictitiously, a product of the author’s imagination. Any similarities to actual events, or persons, living or dead, are purely coincidental.

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Dead in Time

Copyright © 2013 Anna Reith

ISBN: 978-1-907623-11-0

Cover art and design by Anna Reith for Frith Books

All rights reserved. Except for review purposes, the reproduction of this book in whole or part, electronically or mechanically, constitutes a copyright violation.

Published by Frith Books, 2013

www.frithbooks.com

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

This book is a work of fiction. Names, places, events, and characters are fictitious or are used fictitiously, a product of the author’s imagination. Any similarities to actual events, or persons, living or dead, are purely coincidental.

Find more at

www.annareith.co.uk

* * * * *

DEAD IN TIME

* * * * *

Rock ’n’ roll is dream soup; what’s your brand?

~ Patti Smith

* * * * *

Prologue

August 28th 1976

It started as a long, hot summer. Only now it wasn’t just heat but a dry, sucking, breathless thing. Still, stagnant air that choked all it touched, malicious and unrelenting… and it scared him. He stared at the polystyrene tiles on his bathroom ceiling. Longest summer of his life, and now he wouldn’t see the end of it.

Shit, man.

His lips, parched and sticking, pulled back into a grimace. This wasn’t funny anymore. He flexed against the vinyl, not quite feeling his hands or feet and not quite managing to move his head.

Nope. Definitely not good.

How long had he been lying here? Hard to be sure. He remembered… not much from the last twelve hours, he decided, but then it had been turning into a hell of a party. Yeah, and that was a thought, wasn’t it? There had to be plenty of people still in the house. Someone would be bound to find him. Bound to come blundering up the wrong stairs, back into these private rooms, this small sanctuary—because they always did, and that’s one of the things Inez got pissed off about, right?—and they’d find him.

Inez.

Consciousness started to slip away from him again. He tried once more to turn his head and groaned when the pain hit, searing and crushing, his whole skull gripped by some huge claw. His neck was on fire, but his feet felt cold. Trippy. Weird, but not as weird as seeing part of his own temple smeared across the side of the maple sink cabinet. A few strands of hair waved in the convection of the shower heat, and there was blood… a lot of blood, painted stark against the white basin.

Oh.

Funny, he didn’t remember doing that.

His body spasmed in an attempt at a retch. Coughing, he barely felt the bloody ooze and the phlegm slide down his face. His vision blurred again, the bathroom walls misting in a jumble of melting shapes. Steam coiled across the room in a liquid prism of unimaginable colours.

Whoa, man, he murmured, because… because, like, this could really be it.

The end.

This time, maybe. And it was so quiet. He hadn’t expected that. The house lay far enough from the road for him not to hear the cars. Secluded—the reason he’d bought it. You weren’t s’posed to hear cars in the country. He realised that no birds were singing in the trees outside, either. He noticed that now, now that he’d got used to it. The birds almost replaced the dim thrum of the traffic he’d grown up with… rarer, sweeter, but still the same; still the sounds of life, the sounds of living. All swallowed up in silence now.

It made sense, then. Maybe things went that way when you… y’know.

Everything, just a final hush.

He hadn’t thought much about death before. Not actual death, as in the ending of his own life. Oh, there’d been times he’d ducked fists, knives, or screaming girls—scarier, in a way—and times he’d been really hammered, or done bad shit and thought he’d die because nobody could be that utterly, completely fucked up and live… but he hadn’t really thought about it. He wasn’t sure he wanted to start now, but the pain kept getting worse.

He should have told Inez he hadn’t meant it.

No. Fuck it, he would tell her. ’Cos… ’cos she’d come back, wouldn’t she? Yeah. She would, and she wouldn’t be happy about this. She’d just sigh, like he’d proved her right about something she hadn’t even bothered to accuse him of… sigh, and roll her eyes. And she had a point, he knew. This was really stupid.

Someone would have to call an abulamance, he realised.

An… amblibance.

Blue light. Noise. One of them things.

What the fuck’s happening to my head?

Insistent bony fingers of panic prodded at his brain.

No one’s coming. No one’s there. You are entirely, completely alone.

No more chances.

Nnn…. He tried to speak, but his tongue seemed dry and too big for his mouth.

On the plus side, after what he’d gone through when he woke up, there couldn’t possibly be anything left in his stomach, so if he was going, it wouldn’t be like Jimi. ’Cos he’d never wanted that. Not that and not, like, flat on his back with a needle in his arm, nor slipping away on some slick, rainy, midnight road. None of those clichéd rock star jags, man. That… that just proved people right, y’know?

But at least something like that could be quick and full of impact.

Not like this.

Not this way.

He thought he heard a door close, somewhere out on the landing. There. Someone would walk in, any minute now. Someone would save him.

Shit, why am I so tired?

Blood still seeped from the broad, ugly wound on his brow. It stung his eyes. In his mouth, the sweat-salt of blood and… tears? Christ, he was an idiot. He wheezed sharply, surprised to find his chest tight and cold. The numbness kept spreading. Fear snaked through him as he fought for breath with rhythmic, bloody gulps of panic. It was it.

Please, no. Not like this. Not alone.

Wait.

No, not alone. Somewhere… in the bedroom? No. Across the hall. In his studio, in his sanctified, private, special place with crooked wall and exposed beam and view of river. No! Someone… messing with his tape deck. Inez? He moved his lips, his mouth slack and cold now, trying to say her name.

Music. He heard the sound of his own voice, sketchy and thin as he worked his way around the embryonic ideas that got him out of bed at three in the morning. She shouldn’t be in there. That was his shit, man… Inez knew better than that. Better, unless she was really pissed off. Like when she ransacked his wardrobe in a temper, with pinking shears and paint. Or broke the windscreen on the Jeep.

Couldn’t she forgive? Just one time?

He could.

Footsteps, on the landing. He flexed his fingers, trying to brace himself against the slick floor, to sit up, but his body wasn’t listening. The door creaked, and he scrabbled with faint feet and fingers at the lavatory, the sink, the tiles, trying to haul himself up and only dimly aware of losing control of his bladder.

A soaring guitar line, sharp and raw, curled around him, knitting like a solid thing into the steam as he stared for the last time at the ceiling, strangely aware of how cold the floor felt beneath him.

I ain’t never gonna get that lick right now. S’a real bust, man….

He thought he felt a warm hand on his shoulder—for a moment, almost companionable—and then he was moving so fast, up and up, and he wanted to scream because he knew nothing but the pain.

That it ended soon wasn’t much of a consolation.

He dropped back to the tiles and, naked except for the plastic shower curtain that fluttered down to half-cover his body, Damon Brent died.

Chapter One

Brighton is nice in the spring. It has its charms all year round, but is, I think, at its best when the weather is pleasantly warm, but not yet hot enough to melt the tarmac or encourage otherwise sane men to go out in public in nothing but shorts, sandals, and a sheen of sweat. I lived in a flat on the edge of Kemp Town village—ten minutes to the city centre and only five minutes’ walk to the seafront—and, while I might not have exactly been happy, I’d started getting my life back on track.

I even had a sea view, just. You had to sit on the window seat and press your nose to the glass, or get someone to hold your legs while you hung out of the tiny bathroom window, but you could see it. Nothing but a murky grey band on the horizon, the suggestion of white caps to swelling waves, rather than the panoramic views you got with the expensive apartments further along the seafront. My building—a Victorian townhouse, carved unceremoniously into flats by developers sometime in the Seventies—hardly matched up to those high-class Regency extravaganzas, built like limestone and stucco wedding cakes, but it was comfortable and fairly convenient for the university.

I’d begun the second year of my social history PhD—Ad nauseam: images of women in advertising 1900-1970—hoping less for the thrill of becoming Doctor Ellis Ross than the security of landing myself a junior lectureship. I’d have taken a museum post, too, or even archive work. Anything that interested me, paid a regular salary and wasn’t one of the ‘women’s jobs’ that, aside from marriage, had been the only route out of the home for generations of girls in my family. Old-fashioned, I know, and probably a stereotype I could have fought against more violently if I’d wanted, but however stuck in the mid-twentieth century I thought my family were, I still owed them a lot.

No. Nursing, teaching, and secretarial work; not bad choices, but not my choices. And that mattered.

It also explained why I came to be working so late on Thursday night. And it was late… more specifically, about half a bottle of Rioja and four cups of black coffee away from Friday morning. Perhaps I’d been overdoing it a little bit. Friends had gently reminded me that student all-nighters usually stopped after undergraduate finals, but there I sat all the same, sifting through a pile of facsimile adverts from 1932 for automated floor cleaners.

The top page featured society brides of the preceding year and told the thoroughly modern, independent new women of the sophisticated Thirties that they, too, could be liberated from the shackles of housework in order to look nice for their prospective husbands.

Will any of these modern girls be scrubwomen at forty?

It asked in bold, loud print.

Hmmm. Almost as good as the 1968 slogan for grape-flavoured Tipalets:

Blow in her face and she’ll follow you anywhere.

The lies human beings are capable of telling each other—and themselves—had never failed to amaze me. How we worked our way through life as a species like that, founding our worlds on tissues of fibs and porkies, was the central point behind my thesis.

I poured myself another glass of wine. Behind me, Mr. Tibbs dozed peacefully on the sofa. A large, black tomcat of indeterminate age, he’d turned up three days after I moved in and had never left. Beneath his gentle feline snoring and the occasional soft yowl as he disembowelled some many-legged dream critter, the stereo played softly, blocking out the general static of the night.

Stretching, I yawned and wondered if it would be worth going to bed. The stereo whirred faintly, slipping another CD into place. I blinked, briefly confused, because I hadn’t expected anything else in the playlist. The confusion turned to surprise as a heavy four-four drum intro echoed out of the speakers, split by a tight, wailing guitar in the third beat. When the hell had I put that in there?

I recognised it, even before a voice—a light, agile tenor, dripping with the imperious sex appeal of black leather trousers—curled into the room, working over a hard, fat blues in E.

Got me gunnin’ for ya baby,

Got you in my eyes tonight

Down at heel, on my wheel,

Girl we gonna make it right

I smiled to myself. The title track from Brother Rush’s Rush On Love album of 1975. The disc was an expanded edition, part of a boxed set that I’d bought for Mum, a gesture of reconciliation after years of mocking her taste in music.

A true child of the revolution, she’d been a glam kid all the way, littering my own childhood memories with twangy glitter guitars, primal four-four rhythms, and kitschy vocals that didn’t need to make sense. Good honest rock ’n’ roll, she’d called it, and she had danced around the house, dusting, vacuuming, cooking, all to the strains of T. Rex, Suzi Quatro, Slade, and Alice Cooper. While other kids’ mums doted on inoffensive, cardigan-wearing crooners as an early sign of menopausal mayhem, my sister Becky and I had a parent who still treasured mementos from the Marquee Club and laughed at all the in-jokes in films like Velvet Goldmine.

But Brother Rush… oh, how she’d adored those four shaggy-haired boys from Bermondsey! When I was small and my sister had gone out to school or Guides or some such thing from which age or chronic shyness precluded me, Mum and I had danced our way together through such classics as Saturday Loving, Darby & Joan, and Sit Tight, Baby. As I grew, I found it embarrassing, then cringeworthy—but funny in an ironic and post-modern kind of way—and, eventually, I grew old enough to enjoy being a child.

Mum didn’t dance anymore by then. But, when the boxed set came out, I’d bought it for her, even though she still owned all her vinyl. She unwrapped the package during a sit-down birthday meal in the Cricketer’s Rest near Thorley and touched the cover art like the cheek of an old friend. She drank two gin and tonics with her steak and ale pie and told my sister and me about the day Damon Brent died. Even then it made her cry… although that could have been the gin mixing with her pills.

The day it happened, she said, she’d met up early with our Auntie Jan and Auntie Gail (whose kinship was purely honorific, but who’d been in our lives since we were in knitted booties just the same). It was that long, hot, anarchic summer of ’76, when everything smacked just a little of sex and violence, though the majority of it seemed to bypass East Hertfordshire’s pretty villages and quaint market towns. Mum, Jan, and Gail had been planning on a swim at the new Grange Paddocks pool, then maybe some shopping before drifting off to their various part-time jobs in the local boutiques and, in Gail’s case, the Cecil Rhodes museum.

They caught the announcement on the news, Mum said, on a twenty-two inch screen in the window of Jerry Dickson’s TV & Radio Hire (in Medlar Lane, just off the High Street, as was), as they crossed the road on their way up to the sports centre.

She said it took less than twenty minutes to get home at a run and, though Granddad never approved of modern music in general, and men with hair below their ears in particular, parental arguments and work commitments alike got swept aside with the full force of inconsolable, desperate teenage tears. The three of them leapt aboard the train from Bishop’s Stortford within the hour, more or less, and by half past four that afternoon, they’d become part of the throng that was flowing into Gloucester station. People, mostly girls, pooled for taxis, buses or sympathetic local drivers to take them to the hamlet of Rodley and the renovated sloop captain’s house with electric gates that lay between it and a muddy, shallow strip of the Severn.

The TV reports soon showed drifts of limp flowers and pale faces, clustered in silent despair at the end of the driveway. Mum said the most striking thing was the quiet. Even when the rain came, a real downpour, the first breakthrough rainfall of that drought year, they never really noticed it, just standing, watching the cars come and go, uniformed officers redundant in the damp stillness and the blue lights of panda cars reflecting in puddles.

At least, that’s how she told it.

Brent had been idolised enough—and the transport, in those years of three-day weeks and power cuts, was bad enough—for the vigil to last days, with more people arriving well into the night. By dusk, Mum said the rock star death reportage, moving from full flow to torrent, was suggesting Brent had died in his bathroom, encouraging the assumption that a drug binge had ended finally and messily on the tiles.

Croaked by Coke?

Damon Brent Drug Death Horror!

The Sun had proclaimed by the evening edition, although they later apologised and retracted the allegation. The Times carried a discreet four-line obituary on page five, and even The Express took a day off from their anti-immigration bashing of the ‘4-star Malawi Asians’ to run a condescending opinion piece or two. Mum and Auntie Jan had all the cuttings, carefully pasted into the sad final pages of their Damon Brent scrapbook.

The initial shock of it soon got subsumed by the scandal of drug investigations and the clamour of the tabloids preaching, while simultaneously dishing out their column inches to ‘insider’ exposés from guests and former friends of the deceased. Worse—or luckily, depending I suppose on what kind of PR team you had—there had been a party at the house the night before and, even as the police carted Brent out in a body bag, nearly two dozen rock and pop luminaries of the day were being expected to give urine samples and full witness statements.

Of course, the inquest quashed much of this ghoulish fun by establishing that Brent, although well under the influence of both drink and drugs, had merely slipped, fallen, and hit his head. The whole thing was chalked up as a stupid accident, the misplacement of foot on soap and an advertisement to the young to stay clean. It crashed his image somehow, wrecking any chance of rock martyrdom. Shunned and embarrassed, Brother Rush split before Christmas, their music fell from fashion, and Damon Brent’s death, if at all remembered, simply became an unfortunate and foolish codicil to a life and a career cut short.

The CD had played on while I was thinking and now a live cut of that classic standard Sit Tight, Baby twisted out of the speakers, the sound of the band broader and harder over the top of a screaming audience. Mum always said how incredible Brother Rush were live. Brent’s voice vibrated in the air, shining as the chords tumbled around him like sweaty roses.

She got a face like the Mona Lisa

(Sit tight, baby)

But she ain’t smilin’

And I can’t see her….

A strident guitar lick topped the four-four bass in a drawn-out crescendo, pierced by the characteristic Damon Brent battle cry: the sound of a vibrato bar pushed to the limits and a jubilant, orgiastic ‘Yeeeeeeaaaaahhhh’ closing in a breathy leer right up against the microphone. You heard it on nearly all the live sets, but it vanished in studio recordings, somewhere in amongst the mumbling and the synthesisers.

Not bad for a man with a dodgy perm and lurex trousers, I murmured, taking off my glasses to rub eyes bees-winged enough to be buzzing.

Well, that’s charming, he said. "Thank you very much."

Huh.

I blinked, and replayed the moment over in my head.

No… I definitely had heard it.

I wished, in a way, that I’d been having weird experiences for months before. It might have proved me crazy, but—knocking pipes, catching strange reflections in the mirror, hearing things on the wind—I hadn’t had any of that. That’s what made it so odd. So believable.

So clear.

I stared at the papers in front of me. They still lay there innocently, black-and-white photo repros and colour plates, page after page of my chicken scratch notes. My wineglass and my coffee cup to the side. The computer screen flipped to its screensaver. Very retro toasters flapped through endless space.

I’d have to turn around eventually. I tried to picture the worst possible thing I could see and, considering that, what I saw wasn’t half as bad as it could have been.

He sat… no, that wasn’t the right word. Nobody could just sit like that. He sprawled, but in an extremely stylish way, on the window seat, one knee drawn up with his right arm propped carelessly across it, his foot tracing circles on the sheepskin rug and a cigarette smouldering in his left hand, threatening to deposit a pillar of ash on his bright purple loon pants.

It was pitch dark outside. I hadn’t bothered to draw the curtains; the window wasn’t really overlooked, so I rarely did and, in any case, I liked the moonlight. The dim tanné glow of streetlamps further down the road gave the blackness a warm edge, backlit him with an odd, pale aura against the dark glass… in which he had no reflection, I couldn’t help but notice.

He wriggled a bit on the window seat, turning his head as if looking out into the night, trying to see the sea. You couldn’t, not at that angle and not at this time of night. Nothing but the smudges of pavements seeming wet under the lamplight and, in very late or very quiet moments, the distant sound of the waves, somewhere in the blackness beyond. I swallowed heavily.

I’d seen Mum’s famous scrapbook more than once. Oh, the blond perm seemed a little more natural-looking and—apart from a lot of heavy, Theda Bara-style kohl—he had none of the stagy make-up he’d worn on half a dozen different album covers.

Definitely Damon Brent, though.

I reasoned, in what I gathered to be my madness, that it must be him. Quite clearly. If a flesh-and-blood look-alike had broken into the flat, I would have heard him, after all. I licked my lips and turned my chair around. In addition to the purple crushed velvet loon pants, white patent boots with spangly silver stars and a two-inch stack heel encased his feet. A tight green babycord jacket buttoned over something gold and shiny and a very long, very stripy scarf completed the picture. On one lapel of the jacket, a gold starburst brooch set with red stones—either truly tacky costume jewellery, or something genuine, Victorian, and very expensive—glittered, catching the light.

He looked at me, all poise and self-assurance and smiled, with perfunctory dimples. I looked at his cigarette, wondering how long he’d been sitting there for it to burn down like that, and it occurred to me that I couldn’t smell the smoke. I opened my suddenly very dry mouth.

Um….

Mm?

Sorry. Do you need an ashtray for that?

I could have been surprised at myself. But, equally, I could just have hyperventilated. Damon Brent looked at the cigarette, as if seeing it for the first time. He smiled at me again, and it seemed more genuine.

Yeah, thanks.

I handed him my mainly empty coffee cup, waiting to see if it smashed to the floor.

There you go. Er, I said, as a pale but very solid hand grasped the handle, I’m afraid that’s the best I can do. I don’t smoke and I wasn’t expecting visitors.

Oh, there’s only one of me, baby. An amused sarcasm touched his eyes as he knocked the ash off his ciggie into the cup. Did I give you the horrors?

The clipped consonants were pure theatre, just like the way the window framed him, but a hard, flat South London accent prowled behind the thickets of crisply trimmed vowels. I flapped my mouth for a bit, the small lucid part of me wondering what the etiquette might be here. ‘Yes, you did. You’re dead,’ seemed a bit brusque.

Sort of, I said eventually. Um…?

Mr. Tibbs still lay fast asleep on the back of the sofa. So much for feline psychism. Or maybe this delusion would stay totally self-contained.

Sorry, said the—what?—apparition, dropping the butt of his cigarette into the cup and setting it down on the narrow band of painted windowsill. "It’s difficult to know how to make an entrance. Didn’t think I’d ever say that, but it is. He raised an eyebrow. You did solid though, baby. No screaming or anything. Very calm. Nice."

That’s only because I’m clearly either mad or dreaming.

The shade, or spectre, or fevered imagining, or whatever he was, of Damon Brent looked at me and smiled kindly.

You can see me, he said. Hear me. Right?

I nodded. Er. Yes. But—

Then you’re only slightly more sane than everybody else, love. I wouldn’t worry about it.

As I wondered just what he meant, his smile spread into a grin, and he wriggled forward on the window seat, pulling a pack of Camels and a silver lighter from the pocket of his jacket.

You’ll be all right. Ah, can’t tell you, though, babe…. This is so cool! I knew you’d come through. Hey, mind if I smoke?

I blinked. He rattled the packet at me.

Oh. Er… sure, I said, partially out of curiosity.

Mystic ghost ciggies? I wondered. He put the slim white tube between his lips. It didn’t look at all unusual and neither did the pack, not… really. It had no glaring black health warnings printed on it, and the artwork seemed dated, though the carton was clearly new.

Thanks. He looked up at me over the lighter’s flame and flashed another dimpled grin. Helps me when I’m nervous.

I said nothing. Him? Nervous? The cigarette’s tip flared red, and he took a long drag. I expected the bitter, acrid smell of tobacco, and the lack of it disorientated me.

You do know me, though? he asked suddenly, earnestly, taking the ciggie out of his mouth. You know who I am?

Damon Brent, I said, before I really meant to.

For all I knew, there could have been some sort of Rumpelstiltskin thing to the passing of the words. Naming him might have made him invincible, or real, or consigned me to the underworld for six months of the year or something. You never can tell, after all.

But there was no puff of pantomime smoke. He just nodded, looking relieved, his expression that of a man whose ego had been well-stroked.

Good. Okay. That’s a good start.

"Start? Start to what? How can…? Why are you—no, wait. How are you here? A note of panic rose in my voice, and I tried to quash it. I mean, you’re…. It’s been more than thirty years. You’re—what are you?"

Oh, baby… that hurts. He pouted, mischief in his eyes, and then a half-formed smoke ring slipped from his mouth like a laugh. Nah. I’m all I ever was, Ellis. Well, near enough.

How—? No. I pinched the bridge of my nose. I’m not even surprised you know my name. But why… why are you—?

He turned to knock cigarette ash into the coffee cup on the sill. Then, unfolding his legs, he stretched away from the window seat like a languid and very trashily dressed cat. He seemed taller than I’d thought.

This doesn’t make any sense. My fingers dug ineffectually at the collar of my baggy overshirt, pulling it tighter around me. Had the room grown colder? Out of all the people I’ve known who’ve died, nobody’s ever popped back to say—

None of them were murdered, said Damon Brent softly.

He moved to the fireplace, ostensibly looking at the row of framed photos I kept on the mantel. Murdered? I couldn’t tear my gaze away from his boots. They sank slightly into the pile of the carpet when he walked, and there wasn’t a thing that looked odd about it; so he must have mass, I reasoned, physical existence of a sort. Yet he left no footprints, no traces of himself. I heard no rustle of velvet, nothing that signified his presence. As if wherever he stood, just for that moment, he could be as solid and real as anyone… but for that moment only. Like trying to catch a shadow seen from the corner of the eye.

Murdered? No, I said, running off at the mouth, unthinking. There was an inquest. It was an accident. My mum—

I was there, sweetheart, Brent said dryly, turning to glance at me over his babycorded shoulder. I had never before seen such old eyes. She wasn’t. So take it from me, yeah?

I blinked, my mind racing to catch up.

But…. How? I mean, you….

He took another pull on the cigarette. The fingertips of his free hand brushed along the white gloss paint of the mantel, his head tilting a little to the side. He seemed lost in thought. He exhaled and turned back to me, the cigarette smoke wreathing fantastical arabesques around him.

Someone smashed my brains in for me, baby. I think that’s pretty conclusive, don’t you? Brent lifted one pale, nicotine-stained hand and waved the smoke away. Look. This is a bit of a head trip, I know…. Have you got any scotch?

No, but there’s, um, there’s gin, I think.

He nodded and looked hopefully at me.

Oh, I said belatedly. "Right, yes. I’ll, er…. Do you—I mean, can you…?"

Something in his face made it seem like a silly question. I got to my feet—pleasantly surprised to find that my legs still worked—and edged out to the kitchen, never quite turning my back on him.

I wasn’t entirely sure what would happen if I did.

In the kitchen, I stared for a while at the white melamine cupboards, because there are few things in life more statically, irrefutably normal than melamine. Everything out here was just as I’d left it on my last coffee break, right down to the teaspoon I hadn’t bothered to wash up and the unwiped worksurfaces. I opened the cupboard, pulled out the bottle of gin I’d bought last Christmas, and fetched two cut-glass tumblers. A quick fumble through the fridge-freezer yielded ice cubes and some slightly flat tonic… and the fact that I still wasn’t panicking surprised me. The simple, deliberate actions of ice, glasses, and tonic, the metallic spin of the lid on the gin bottle, occupied my mind and hands entirely, and I found I’d started worrying about not having any lemon or lime slices.

Murdered.

Well, that made both more and less sense, but… why now? Why, above everything, me? I turned around with a glass in each hand and nearly dropped the lot as I found Damon Brent far closer to me than I could ever have reasonably expected. Like standing in front of an open freezer, a bone-gnawing chill seemed to pull me in. I gasped with the sudden shiver and promptly felt like I’d been really rude, even as I stepped backwards.

Sorry, baby, he said, looking crestfallen.

I could see the beginnings of lines around his eyes, the places the kohl had started to settle. Embryonic lines around his mouth, too, and tiny filaments of golden beard growth; the frizzy, untamed bits of hair, the thick dark blond sideburns, and each one of the bridge of freckles dusted across his nose and cheekbones. The mole on his neck and the pulse beating there… both so wrong and so strange, but not as strange as not being able to smell him. He should have absolutely reeked of cigarette smoke, and there should have been the scent of aftershave—lots of aftershave, if I was any judge—but I couldn’t pick up a thing.

I hurriedly cleared my throat, realising I’d been staring.

Is that why… why you’ve…. Is it why? I managed, keeping my voice even. To avenge your own murder?

I held out one of the G&Ts. He grasped the tumbler with long, callused fingers; the glass seemed to crawl against my skin for a brief, horrible moment, cold and slippery. I did my best not to shudder.

Nah. Brent wrinkled his nose, and the intensity of things lessened slightly. Not exactly. No avenging, anyway. That’s very frowned upon.

He smiled and, despite myself, I let out a short laugh.

Drink up, he prompted, raising his glass.

He waited, watching me drink before taking his first sip. The gin barely touched the sides, but it didn’t much help. I could still see him, for a start. I cradled the tumbler in front of my chest.

I don’t understand, I said, in a masterpiece of understatement. Why me? What—

Shh. Come sit down, yeah? That’s a girl. You’re all right.

He reached out as if to usher me back into the other room, but his hand stopped, half-curled, halfway to my arm. He flashed that perfunctory, dimpled smile again and, taking a big slug of his G&T, stepped back to allow me past. I—unusually for me—obeyed and went through, looking carefully at the carpets, curtains and ceiling, as if my flat had somehow conspired to betray my sanity. Nothing had changed. No melting walls, no wonkier than usual floors…. I toed off my brogues and curled into my armchair, watching Damon Brent prowl across the floor.

You—you said somebody…. I trailed off, not quite willing, or not quite able to voice it. How? I mean, who—

If I knew that, would I fuckin’ be here?

The venom in his voice took me by surprise, and almost instantly I saw the apology on his face. Abruptly, Brent paced to the window, nervy and jangling, like a stop-motion film. Something of that lingered in his movement, and it hurt my eyes trying to follow it, though I couldn’t look away.

Look, he said. It’s not…. It’s complicated, all right?

I wanted to suggest that this drifted close to further epic understatement, but he looked at me with such seriousness that the words stuck to my tongue. He took up his place on my window seat again, one foot slung over his knee, drink cupped elegantly in his hand with his cigarette smouldering in two extended fingers. Like he owned the room, like nothing could shake him. He turned his head and looked out again towards the general direction of the sea, apparently watching the line of silver-grey light starting to rise along the road. Was he waiting for the dawn? Rush On Love played on in the background. His left hand, resting on his knee, tapped absently to the rhythm of a phasey middle eight.

It ain’t, he said carefully, like if some bastard shivs you inna ribs and you get a good look at him on your way down, right? I mean, I was rat-arsed… but I didn’t do all that to myself, Ellis. You gotta believe that.

Brent took a short, urgent pull on his cigarette, still watching me as he exhaled. I swallowed, my interest caught by his words as well as the lunacy of his presence. Murdered…? Oh, if Mum had only known…! He’d missed his perfect avenger.

So, what? I groped for a little clarity. Somebody struck you?

Yeah. He nodded, gaze flicking down to his drink. I remember—I mean, I think I did take a purler—I was laying there on the floor… waitin’ for help. Dunno how long. Could’ve been minutes, hours…. No way of telling, ’cept it bloody hurt.

I wanted to look away. When he spoke again, it came almost as a whisper.

There is…. I mean, I didn’t even know that it was really real, y’know? But it’s the last thing. I didn’t wanna be on my own. I tried to get up, an’ I couldn’t. And there was music. My tapes. Then the door opened and… and I thought I was gonna get help, yeah?

My heart leapt in my throat. He must have seen, then. Something, at least. Some suggestion, some clue. Perhaps he read my mind, because he shook his head.

I didn’t see who it was. I just….

What?

He glanced up at me, pausing to take a swallow of his drink.

Like I meant nothin’, y’know? Just picked me up and, like— He grabbed a handful of hair at the back of his head, jerking it roughly upwards. Blam. That’s it. Finished the job, right?

He lifted the cigarette to his mouth, hair dropping back around his face. His jaw moved tightly, as if he was chewing the smoke. I frowned.

But, if that’s true… how did the autopsy not pick that up?

Brent snorted.

I had enough in my bloodstream to put half the runners in the National under, baby. S’what the pathologist said. And the old Bill were so busy bustin’ everyone there with so much as half an ounce of grass that no one thought…. Nah. Time they put me in the ground, I was just a clumsy drunk, wasn’t I? Good funeral, though. All those people. I’d never’ve thought….

He rubbed his palm over the knuckles of his left hand, making the ice cubes in his drink bob. It didn’t seem like a good moment to ask who he thought might have wanted him dead. I watched the cigarette smoulder